On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The ruling was seven to two. It held that Dred Scott — an enslaved man who had sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived for years in free territories — was not a citizen of the United States and therefore had no standing to bring a case in federal court. It held that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories, striking down the Missouri Compromise of 1820. And it held, in language that Taney apparently believed was a simple statement of historical fact, that Black Americans — free or enslaved — were not and could never be citizens of the United States, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that they had been regarded as so far inferior that they had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them. It was the most consequential judicial decision in American history. It made the Civil War inevitable.
Dred Scott had been enslaved by an Army surgeon named John Emerson, who took him from Missouri — a slave state — to Illinois and then to the Wisconsin Territory, both of which prohibited slavery. Scott argued that his residence in free territory had made him free. The case had worked its way through the courts for eleven years by the time it reached the Supreme Court. The legal question was straightforward: did residence in a free territory confer freedom? The Supreme Court could have answered that narrow question. Instead, Chief Justice Taney — a Maryland slaveholder who had freed his own enslaved people but remained a fervent defender of slavery as an institution — used the case to issue a sweeping ruling on the status of Black Americans in the United States Constitution.
Taney’s argument rested on an interpretation of the founding generation’s intentions. He claimed that when the founders wrote “all men are created equal” and established a government to protect their rights, they did not intend to include Black people. He argued that Black people, at the time of the founding, were universally regarded as an inferior class with no political or social rights. Therefore, the Constitution did not apply to them, could not be made to apply to them by congressional action, and their status was entirely a matter for states to determine. The argument was historically dishonest — free Black men had voted in several states at the time of the founding, and some had participated in state ratifying conventions. Taney’s history was not scholarship. It was advocacy for a predetermined conclusion.
The political consequences were immediate and catastrophic. The ruling invalidated the Missouri Compromise and opened all federal territories to slavery. It destroyed the legal foundation of the Republican Party’s platform, which was premised on Congress’s authority to limit slavery’s expansion. It enraged abolitionists and confirmed the worst fears of those who believed the slave power had captured all three branches of the federal government. Abraham Lincoln, then a lawyer in Illinois, responded in a series of debates with Stephen Douglas that would launch his national political career. He argued that the ruling was wrong, that the founders had intended to include Black Americans in the promise of equality even if they had failed to fulfill it, and that the nation would have to decide whether it would become entirely free or entirely slave. Four years later the Civil War began.
Dred Scott himself was purchased and freed by his original enslaver’s family in May 1857 — two months after the Supreme Court ruled he had no rights. He worked as a hotel porter in St. Louis and died of tuberculosis in September 1858, eighteen months after the ruling that had made his name synonymous with the denial of Black humanity. The monument to his case is not in any courthouse. It is in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, which explicitly overturned Taney’s ruling by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens and are entitled to equal protection of the laws. The amendment was necessary because the Supreme Court had ruled, with seven votes, that Black Americans were not people the Constitution was written to protect. The Civil War was fought, in significant part, to correct that ruling. The correction took 600,000 lives.